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Is Ontario's growth plan intensifying urban sprawl?

Remote communities are becoming development targets, says new research by the Neptis Foundation.

Empty land waiting to be developed in a new subdivision at Belle Aire Beach Rd. and 20th Sideroad in Innisfil. A loophole in the province's growth plans has allowed municipalities to attach development to remote villages and hamlets, causing the urban sprawl the plan was designed to prevent. (Andrew Lahodynskyj for the Toronto Star)

When Mayor Gord Wauchope moved to Innisfil in 1986, there were 12,000 people in the Lake Simcoe-area town.

"We didn't have any pizza parlours, we didn't have any Chinese food restaurants. We had a TD bank in a trailer," said the former Toronto police officer.

Since then, the population has tripled and, by 2041, it is expected to nearly double again to about 60,000.

But a policy gap in Ontario's growth plan is putting much of that population in the wrong places, says new research from the non-profit Neptis Foundation.

It wants the province to clarify where municipalities should be intensifying.

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But drafts of an amended growth plan show ambiguous language being entrenched in the update that is supposed to be released in the first part of this year.

The linguistic loophole is really a contradiction between the 2006 growth plan and a subsequent supporting policy document published two years later. It has allowed municipalities to attach development to remote villages and hamlets.

The result is precisely what the 2006 plan was designed to discourage — urban sprawl, says Neptis executive director Marcy Burchfield.

Some municipalities are building subdivisions far from existing water and wastewater services while land closer to more built-up communities remains vacant, she said.

Burchfield warns that municipalities and taxpayers from Kawartha Lakes to the Niagara Region could be stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to extend water and sewer pipes right past already built-up areas into subdivisions attached to towns that still aren't hooked up to municipal water and wastewater.

Land is being developed in a new subdivision located in Innisfil, Ont. A new study shows that a lot of the cheap houses on the outer edges of the GTA are being built on land that isn't serviced with water and wastewater infrastructure. (Andrew Lahodynskyj for the Toronto Star)

Ontario's growth plan prescribes greater population densities in places with services such as transit throughout the Toronto region and beyond in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.

The plan distinguished urban settlements with full municipal water and wastewater from rural settlements. The latter are also called "undelineated built-up areas" in government documents.

These tiny communities appear only as dots on the map — about 400 of them. The province didn't even draw boundaries around them and hasn't monitored them because they were never expected to be the focus of development, said Burchfield.

But then in a 2008 supplementary policy document, a footnote appeared, contradicting the idea of developing only built-up areas. It said that areas designated for development could consist of "delineated and undelineated built-up areas."

Municipalities interpreted that to mean that they could put new housing in the rural settlement areas and count those subdivisions toward their intensification targets.

Neptis says that 26,100 hectares in those rural settlement areas are already being built on.

In the area known as the "outer ring" — land outside the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area but inside the Greater Golden Horseshoe — places that still rely in whole or in part on well water and septic waste systems are being targeted for development.

Simcoe County, which has planned for 40 per cent of its growth to be in intensification, has approved 65 per cent of that intensified housing for rural settlement areas.

Eighty-three per cent of those new homes are single-family, detached houses rather than denser forms such as townhouses and apartments.

"Development going in there on unbuilt land being counted as intensification is just a mockery of the (growth) plan," said Burchfield.

She cites a plan to grow Bond Head, west of Bradford, from about 500 to 4,400 people by linking it to water treatment in Alcona about 50 kilometres to the east.

"Extending services to this rural community of 500 people while the urban settlement of Bradford has more than 1,700 acres of land designated for development that is potentially serviceable does not make good planning sense," she said.

The mayor of Innisfil acknowledges that Simcoe County has caught the eye of home buyers lured by the relative affordability of single-family homes.

New homes under construction in Innisfil, Ont. (Andrew Lahodynskyj for the Toronto Star)

In a Lormel-built development outside the tiny community of Lefroy, a four-bedroom home sold for $683,000 in January; a two-bedroom bungalow recently went for $595,000. The price of a detached house in the Greater Toronto Area averaged over $1 million last month. Even condos were going for $481,194 on average.

But Wauchope says he wants to keep Innisfil a town.

"I don't want urban sprawl all over the place. We need jobs there more than we need homes. I'd sooner have some employment on the lands that we have at (Highway) 400," he said, adding that people who move up from the city expect urban amenities, including transit, they get in Toronto, Brampton or Mississauga.

"It will come but it takes time," said Wauchope.

Neptis has briefed the province's Growth Secretariat on its findings and its concerns about a lack of provincial monitoring of the growth plan that has led to leapfrog development.

The ministry of municipal affairs and housing told the Star that the Neptis research will be taken into consideration as the province drafts new amendments to the growth plan due out in the first part of this year.

But in a statement to the Star, the ministry said, "The Proposed Growth Plan that was released for consultation continued to direct that the majority of growth should go to areas that are already built up and to settlement areas that offer municipal water and wastewater systems while limiting growth in other settlement areas.

“It also included enhanced policies on integrating growth and infrastructure planning, as well as new policies that would reduce the ability of municipalities to expand Great Lakes based servicing."

High cost of hooking up

The new homes outside the Simcoe County village of Lefroy are on municipal water and wastewater. But not all the communities in Innisfil are as fortunate. Guildford and Stroud, for example, aren't fully serviced and even Mayor Gord Wauchope's Innisfil Heights neighbourhood is on a septic system.

There is a plan to connect all those places to municipal water and wastewater

But that takes time, he said.

The pipes come with the builders, said Wauchope. There's a $50,000 development charge on average for each house built in Innisfil. If you build a subdivision of 500 houses, that's roughly $25 million.

It will cost about $57.7 million to run water and waste water out to the Innisfil employment lands near Highway 400.

Wauchope said he expects to announce in June or July that the county has loaned the town the money "at a very reasonable rate."

"Right now we've got a three-year loan. But hopefully they will extend it to 10 or 15," he said.

But having developers pay the upfront costs of servicing land doesn't solve the problem, said Neptis Foundation executive director Marcy Burchfield.

Unlike Peel or Halton regions, many smaller municipalities don't necessarily have the capacity to calculate lifecycle costs of big infrastructure, she said.

"The energy required to pump water and wastewater back and forth to those places . . . it costs a lot in terms of maintenance and life cycle decisions down the road. That's not being factored into the decisions when the developers are offering to pay the fronting costs. Municipalities are having to pay back those costs as well," she said.

Lefroy is not the only undelineated built-up area that will be connected to water treatment in Alcona, says Neptis.

In a brief published Thursday, the foundation says that areas scattered across Innisfil and Bradford West Gwillimbury, including Big Bay Point/Friday Harbour to the northeast, the employment lands near Highway 400 and Bond Head will all be linked to the shores of Lake Simcoe.

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